“I don’t mind,” she said as she drove. “I’ll do it if you want me to.”
“No,” he said. “I
“If you say so,” she said.
She was pulling into Treasury parking, normally only available to the most senior employees, but Cerny had arranged a spot for her. She showed her government pass. It opened the gate. A guard waved her through.
“I say so,” he said. “I’m fine with everything. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
“Let’s go to the Athenian tonight, okay?”
“Looking forward to it,” she answered.
Her fiance could get a little testy, a bit territorial, a bit overprotective at times. She already knew that. But sound reason would always prevail. There was never any reason for him to get jealous. But what stayed with her was an underlying subtext. In his eyes, in his spirit, he seemed to have a premonition of some sort. A sense of danger. Maybe of potential loss. Or maybe he sensed something imperfect that was in the air and yet to come.
The worst part about it was that she shared the same feeling. There was somewhere hanging out there the notion that a third party could somehow do something that could come between them, separate them, take that perfect partner away from the other. It was a horrible sensation. But was it really there? Or were their worst fears just wandering around like sprits or phantoms, looking to settle somewhere?
TWENTY-TWO
On her final day before departure, Alex had lunch with her boss, Mike. He wished her well and expressed the fear that she might be permanently assigned outside his department. She reassured him that if that were the case, she had heard nothing about it. Nor was she inclined to stay with this sort of assignment. She was anxious to do a one-time-only job and return to what passed for a normal life.
In the afternoon there was a final torturous Ukrainian lesson from the baroness. Then in the late afternoon, a final briefing from Michael Cerny on Ukrainian politics. “There’s been tyranny, criminal behavior, and instability for a thousand years. Probably more. No point to expect much different now,” he said.
“Thanks for the cheerful worldview,” she said.
“I’m a realist, so don’t mention it,” Cerny answered. “I’ll try to say hello before you leave tomorrow. If I miss you, don’t worry about it.”
She left the office at 6:00 p.m. and went to the gym, partly out of habit, partly because exercise released tension.
She showered, went home, and changed into some casual clothes. Robert picked her up at 9:00 p.m.
They went out to a nice place for dinner, a French place they liked in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, just a fifteen-minute walk across the Duke Ellington Bridge that spanned Rock Creek Park. La Fourchette on the Eighteenth Street Strip. Great food, but not at all formal, with a genuine French woman keeping an eagle eye on guest satisfaction.
Robert was irritated by a reassignment within the White House. His duties hadn’t changed but his partner had. The Service had brought in a ballistics expert named Reynolds Martin to accompany the president on the impending trip and join the small army of assigned agents. Robert was assigned to partner with Martin, whose behind-the-back nickname was “Jimmy Neutron.”
“The boy genius,” Robert said, as he glanced at the menu. “Or at least he thinks he is.”
Alex managed to laugh.
“Anyway, after the trip, he’s back to the Denver office, so I don’t have to deal with him for too long.”
“Single guy?” she asked.
“Family. He’s got a wife in Colorado Springs and a girl. Tina. Age eight.”
“Jimmy Neutron,” she said. “That’s funny. I like that.”
They both laughed. “To tell you the truth, he doesn’t seem like a bad guy to me. Other people have had their issues though. Here,” he said, picking up the wine list and handing it to her. “You read French and you know what I like. Pick something out.”
She picked out a Cotes du Rhone, four years old, and ordered a couple of steaks. Why not? They had a great dinner and got gently buzzed.
After dinner, they went back to his place for a dessert and some coffee.
He had a small gift for her.
He had visited one of the better-known jewelers in Washington, an extension of a big New York store. He had picked out an inauspicious but pretty bracelet for her; a strand of rolled silver threaded with gold. It came in the store’s normal blue box with a white ribbon.
She opened the box and immediately let him place it on her wrist.
“Just one more thing for me to remove on our wedding night,” he teased her. They laughed together and embraced.
“Wear it in Ukraine,” he said. “When I see you in Kiev I’m going to look for it.”
“It’s a promise,” she said.
“You also have to promise to return safely,” he said. “I don’t like the fact that you’ll be there for three days on your own.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t like Cerny either,” he said.
She was startled. “I thought he was your friend,” she said.
“No. I only
“Did you ever have a chance to-?”
“Oh, yeah I ran their names against the personnel computers,” he said. “I didn’t find anything that I didn’t already know.”
She asked directly. “Is he CIA or not? And that battle-ax who works with him. Countess von Olga. What about her?”
“No entries on her,” he said. “If he’s CIA, he’s at a high enough level so that my own access to it is blocked. I can’t find anything further than that. But that doesn’t address the ‘blue card-green card’ situation,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Back in 1992 after the CIA was hit with major budget cuts, they started contracting out a lot of special assignments. A CIA officer could turn in retirement papers and his blue ID badge one day and go to work for a military contractor the next day. He or she would come back into the same Langley building with a green ID the next morning at a higher salary but with no government oversight. After September of 2001, the outsourcing went completely nuts. Green-badge bosses were recruiting blue-badge employees right in the CIA cafeteria.”
“And no one stopped it?”
“Who would stop it during that era? Figure that the federal budget includes about five hundred million for intelligence gathering, but now the CIA only gets one percent of that. The Pentagon gets the rest and pays the military contractors. The taxpayers get three times as high a bill, but if there’s a screwup, the Pentagon ‘classifies’ it so no one can investigate. So even if Cerny has a State Department ID, who knows who’s really running his operation?”
“Got it.”
“Take it from there.”
“Got it,” she said again, nodding, and not reassured in the least.
She arrived home past 1:00 a.m. She organized her apartment, wrote out checks to pay bills, and dropped them in the mail chute in the hallway.
She walked back into her own apartment, closed the door, stopped, and listened.
There was something about her own place that was giving her the creeps these days. She couldn’t place it, but it was there.
